Entropy and empires collide in Sunless Skies, the best game of 2019

There are two things that Sunless Skies does really well that Sunless Seas doesn’t.

  1. It’s a huge and ginormous world. Like…super, duper big.
  2. It wants you to explore it.

In Sunless Seas, the roguelike mechanic in place in the game made me feel like I had to keep a constant eye on fuel and supplies. I just felt…tethered, really, to Fallen London.

In Sunless Skies, they’ve taken off the leash. Yes, you do still have to manage fuel and supplies, but you burn them much slower, and get to explore far more…and hey! The places to refuel/refit/resupply are fairly easy to find, especially early on.

And so once you take that sort of spreadsheety activity out as a super-big concern for players, it’s just “Welcome to this huge world. Come do stuff in it. Frolic in it. Discover story at your pace. Kinda be amazed as disparate story bits start to come together in these beautifully intricate ways you didn’t expect.”

I love love love this game so goddamn much.

I had no idea the game was about time, a subject that fascinates and terrifies me.
And now I oh so understand Sunless Skies’ place. After all, it seems like a perfect successor to Quadrilateral Cowboy.
Thanks for the wonderful read, and all the images, Tom.

Yep , fantastic review, gotta add this back to my wishlist.

Great pick, Tom! It really is amazing.

The risk/reward of exploration, pushing your crew and your ship to the brink of doom or madness, and the way things go wrong when they inevitably go wrong, all of it has the feel of great fiction. It’s a unique experience.

I would also like to nominate Sunless Skies for two of @CLWheeljack’s ‘Arbitrary’ awards:

Best Non-VR VR Game of the Year: I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll be forever alone on this, but I love playing all kinds of non-VR PC games in gigantic-curved-desktop-theater mode and Sunless Skies is the creme de la creme example of why I love it. Shut out the real world completely and just get totally immersed in those haunting sights and sounds while the boundaries of Albion linger just outside my peripheral vision. >chef’s kiss<

Best Soundtrack Canvas: I love matching music to games, like really nailing a mood, and it’s a blast to dream up tonight’s soundscape before playing Sunless Skies. It supports all kinds of obvious choices (soundtracks like 2001, Moon, or Blade Runner) or more outre genres (ambient, drone, experimental.) All of it works and just enhances the uniqueness of the gameplay.

Haven’t played it in a while so this is a good excuse to jump back in for more!

I am a supporter (recently). What password is this? I tried the password I use for my Patreon account and it did not work. Or is it the QT3 forum password?

In Tom’s latest Patreon post, he mentions a special password.

The password is in the Patreon post! I’ll PM It to you as well.

BTW, I feel a bit dopey putting a review – I mean, who cares? – behind a password for Patreon supporters, but my feeling is that I’ve neglected them for so long that I want to do something, no matter how trivial.

-Tom

Thanks! I 100% support you sharing it with supporters first. It gives them something now, and still makes the content available for the wider community later.

Look all we ask for is the occasional ZIP file of feet pics and ASMR nose hair trimming videos. Is that really so much?

I’ve never even thought about playing it this way, but man. What you describe, the incredible times when the sky just stretches out with just the sound of your engines chugging away…Gonna give that a shot tonight.

Thanks Armando, I totally missed that and thought I was losing my mind…

So…the only new game I played last year was your favorite? Man. Who knew?

Exceptional pick, Mr. Chick. Truly a wonderful, awe-inspiring and terrifying game.

The review is as poetic as the game itself!

Even screenshots show how much of an improvement this game is. Sunless Sea put the text in a small window in a corner, compared to Fallen London it felt like a switch from Baldur’s Gate to Neverwinter Nights. Sunless Skies nows that it’s all about the text. The only sin of this game is that it’s hard to process for someone like me who is not a native speaker. Also they’ve committed a sin by promising an enhanced edition (Sovereign Edition) later so I can’t play it at the moment.

Surprised this is your #1, but it is a great game, and truly beautiful.

Man. So I need to find time for this, and Control, and Disco Elysium. I wonder if they’ll be on Gamepass sometime.

Did you get a chance to try playing with your space goggles? What did you think?? My research suggests that this kind of thing isn’t for everyone but, dammit, I like it!

So what’s the best way to try this?

I tried just starting it in Steam while wearing the headset, but I guess I’m not used to flying blind on mouse + keyboard like that.

Thanks for posting this. I bounced off Fallen London because I hated how tethered I felt to, well, London. I will have to give this a try.

Yeah, when I played Sunless Seas, I felt like every time things were getting super great…I had to beeline it back to a base to refuel/refit.

And Tom’s review makes another great point. The trade system in the game is fairly unique. It’s an interesting mechanic without being a terribly difficult gameplay loop, if that makes sense. It somehow seems easy, but not boring, if that’s possible. Basically, the trade system should click pretty much right away, and then it’s simply executing it – but you know what you need to know to execute it, too.

It’s a gameplay thing that probably wouldn’t work in a game where trade is the core game element. Here, though, it’s a way to offer you lots of carrots to keep you moving forward in exploration and in the world, and that means that the game can spin more story towards you – which is the king that every system in the game is still geared to serve.